Erin Andrews and FOX: Perfect partners in a voyeuristic World

With former Uber-sideline reporter Erin Andrews moving to FOX Sports, once more we are reminded just how swarthy and essentially incestuous a place the Internet is. The basics, for those of you new to this breaking story, a once famous and now considerably less famous side-line reporter has left a big sports website to move to a smaller sports website. That’s it really. From the wild reaction on the Internet, you would think Bryce Harper just stormed in on a Phillies post-game press conference wearing a Hells Angels tank-top, smacked Cole Hamels in the back of the head with a baseball bat, renounced Mormonism and snogged a female reporter on the way out in triumph.

Andrews and FOX are of course perfect partners. Perfect in the same way Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise were for each other. If you recall, Erin Andrews was once victim of a voyeur who invaded her privacy in a hotel some years back. FOX are absolute masters at voyeuristic invasions of privacy. Their owners, News Corp, have spent the better part of 2012 in courtrooms in the United Kingdom fighting, unsuccessfully, allegations that they tapped the phones of celebrities, politicians and regular Joe Punters, basically in an attempt to get breaking news stories without performing any, you know, journalism.

Naturally they are perfect for each other! Erin can rest easy in the knowledge that her phone is probably being tapped, and that next time she dates their text messages and phone conversations will probably be editing room fodder for News Corp journalists, and not just perverts in random lonely, hotel voyeur incidents.

In case you think Andrews and the rest of you in the States are safe because the News Corp ‘issue’ occurred in England only, well excuse me, you couldn’t be more wrong. One of the more disgusting incidents in the UK version was that News Corp was found guilty of hacking into the private phones and voice-mail containers of deceased British service men. They did this in order to be able to splash messages from grief stricken friends and family on their papers, primarily The News Of The World. The police in New York have exposed News Corp previously, in 2009, for attempting to do something very similar in America. Almost unbelievably they attempted to retrieve private phone records of victims of the September 11 attacks.

Now if that isn’t the lowest of the low, it is pretty damn close.

And now Erin Andrews, a victim of voyeuristic crime, works for FOX Sports, who are directly owned by News Corp, who also owned the now defunct News Of The World, who, amongst other voyeuristic activities, hacked into peoples phones.

In a way it is all very symmetrical and beautiful.

Then again in another, more realistic way, it is absolutely disgusting, alarming, and possibly one of those little signs of the decay of Western civilization that we see cropping their ugly little head up every so often.